Official Google+ for iPhone hits the App Store [Update]

Google+ for iPhone, the official app of Google's new social network has just hit the App Store.

Google+ for mobile makes sharing the right things with the right people a lot simpler. Huddle lets you send super-fast messages to the people you care about most. And no matter where you are, the stream lets you stay in the loop about what your friends are sharing and where they’re checking in.

Features:

Circles let you share the right things with just the right people.

Stream is where you can get updates from your circles or see what people are saying about things nearby.

Huddle is super-fast group messaging for everyone in your circles.

Google+ is only available for users 13 and older.

Overall the app is clean and crisp, fully in keeping with Google's new interest in design. The login experience, however, which throws you back to the terrible Google web page, burned my eyes. Hopefully they can fix that in an update. Soon.

It's very Facebook for iPhone-like, which is good or bad depending on your stance re: consistency vs. innovation, but it works well and moves smoothly for the most part (I wish that hadn't copied some of the more crashes...). The home screen isn't full yet, with Stream (which apparently isn't iOS 5 friendly), Huddle, Photos, Profile (Lion style circled avatar -- who thought that was a good idea?), and Circles.

No iPad support yet, and strangely it doesn't support iPod touch either.

I believe it IS shining. Its sleek and clean. Just like Google advertised when they launched it, it is sharing in an internet enabled world.
Circles is probably the slickest concept on friends I've seen in a social network!

Update 1.0.1.1809 has appeared already ...
Better support for blocking unwanted messages in Huddle
Better support for attaching photos to a post
Various bug fixes and performance improvements
iOS5 still crashes on profile views though

According to a Google Engineer/PM, the App Store was serving an outdated test version of the app, which was corrected 1h40m after it went live -- the 1.01 version.https://plus.google.com/u/0/111499908439497508351/posts
Whether this was Google or Apple's mistake the post makes no comment, but that would explain the record turnaround.

Initial thoughts.
1) No crash problems here -- I must be one of the lucky few, or I just do not have many people in my Stream view.
2) Overall positive -- similar experience to the webapp, with a few extra features the webapp cannot provide, as well as a couple of puzzling omissions (resharing, single messages) that perhaps I just have not yet found.
3) Both the webapp and the native app need a quicker way to mute posts, or chatty posts dominate the top of your stream. (A couple of chrome extensions handle the job on the desktop.)
4) Having the webapp and the native app reverse the stream swipe order (webapp Nearby->Circles->Incoming, native app Incoming->Circles->Nearby) is a bad case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and not acceptable if Google wants its new focus on design to be taken seriously.

Seems like an odd move halfway through the beta cycle to release something that doesn't work with the new. Many people use this time to get their app out for testing while they still have time before the new one drops. Can't really complain because it's testing but it is odd because it's the only app I have that doesn't work (iCab didn't with beta1 and beta2 broke Chase, but everything else works with beta3).